_Tiger Lilies_, his first published book (1867), is a document not only in the life of Lanier but also in the transition period of the sixties. It is a crude first novel full of a strange mixture of weakness and strength. It has been likened to Longfellow's _Hyperion_, but the likeness extends no further than this: _Tiger Lilies_ is the novel transitional to the seventies as _Hyperion_ was transitional to the romantic thirties and forties. In parts it belongs completely to the older period. It opens with this outburst, not by Paul Fleming, but by Paul Rübetsahl: "Himmel! Cospetto! Cielo! May our nests be built on the strongest and leafiest bough of the great tree Ygdrasil! May they be lined with love, soft and warm, and may the storms be kind to them: Amen and Amen!" said Paul Rübetsahl. The first part is florid in the extreme and artificial, full of literary affectations and conceits: On the last day of September, 1860, huntsman Dawn leapt out of the East, quickly ran to earth that old fox, Night, and sat down on the top of Smoky Mountain to draw breath, etc. Its discussions of poetry, of music, of the meaning of art and of life generally are all in the dream-world of German romance, and its chaotic plot and its impossible characters and happenings are in full keeping. But with part two the book comes suddenly to life. The hero enters the war and all at once there is realism, passages like this as graphic even as Whitman: The wounded increase. Here is a musket in the road: there is the languid hand that dropped it, pressing its fingers over a blue edged wound in the breast. Weary pressure, and vain--the blood flows steadily. More muskets, cartridge-boxes, belts, greasy haversacks, strew the ground. Here come the stretcher-bearers. They leave a dripping line of blood. "Walk easy as you kin, boys," comes from the blanket which the men are carrying by the corners. Easy walking is desirable when each step of your four carriers spurts out the blood afresh or grates the rough edges of a shot bone in your leg. The sound of a thousand voices, eager, hoarse, fierce, all speaking together yet differently, comes through the leaves of the undergrowth. A strange multitudinous noise accompanies it--a noise like the tremendous sibilation of a mile-long wave just before it breaks. It is the shuffling of two thousand feet as they march over dead leaves.